Renting a home can be a daunting endeavor. There's the process of apartment hunting, finding the right space for your needs, and then the arduous background checks and financial assurances expected by nearly every prospective landlord. But the process of researching that landlord can be even more difficult, as researcher John Johnson can tell you.
"Large landlords – even some small landlords – often use a different LLC to own their different properties. And so if you’re just sort of naively looking at the data, it’s very difficult to tell what a given landlord actually owns and the way that they behave across those properties," he explains.
Johnson compiled the dataset for landlordmapper.org, a website that has created a database of property owners. Users simply input an address, and the website provides information on who owns the property, other properties owned by that same landlord, violations, and eviction filings.
"There's a handful of landlords in the city who control an awful lot of the supply that exists there, and we see that landlords behave in very different ways one company to another," says Johnson. "Some of them file evictions constantly... whereas other landlords will only file evictions when they really mean it, and we see that most of their eviction filings actually lead to an eviction order."
Currently, the tool only covers the City of Milwaukee. Johnson hopes the website will help tenants better understand who they're renting from and reveal the large network of properties owned by relatively few landlords.
